In 2003, the inventors began working on technology that would measure white-tailed deer antlers using photographic images. Ultimately, a new software application was developed that would provide very accurate three-dimensional estimates of antlers and horns and provide a scoring system for comparison to other antlered and horned animals.
Hirakawa and Maeda described the use of bat wing measurements to scale photographs taken by automated cameras at a presentation at the 8th International Theriological Congress in 2001. Subsequently, these same authors published this methodology in a 2006 issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin.
Similar technologies have also been published that determine physical characteristics of unrestrained animals. For example, Kelly (2001) imported photographic images of cheetahs into a graphical user interface (GUI) to take measurements of animal physical characteristics from one or more images. Kelly (2001) made measurements on the photographic images to quantify the physical characteristics of animals.
The present invention in a preferred embodiment is distinctive from prior art methods and systems. U.S. Pat. No. 7,711,151 (Jurk) provides for a system and method for determining physical characteristics of an unrestrained animal, describes a process of capturing and displaying images of an animal which is not unique, and has an undocumented level of accuracy. Capturing and loading animal images into a computer and displaying the images on a GUI has been used by the trail camera industry at least since the 1990′s for viewing photos and analyzing animals (Thomas 2010) and in wildlife research to quantify antler characteristics of individual animals in a process that estimated population characteristics (Jacobson, et al. 1997; Heilbrun, et al. 2003). The known process of capturing, viewing, and manipulating photographic images of animals in a computer GUI has been used for quite some time (Kelly 2001, Hastings, et al. 2001, Thomas 2010). The present invention provides a system and method to transform measurements from an image into numerical estimates of absolute antler and horn size of deer and other animals. The invention produces a realistic, accurate three-dimensional estimate of antler and horn characteristics by statistically manipulating two-dimensional measurements taken from photographic images and scoring the characteristics for comparison.
The system of the present invention utilizes a unique set of anatomical features and process for scaling pictures. For example, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, a nostril is “either of the external openings of the nose,” indicating that typically one would scale a photo using a single opening that runs laterally up the side of an animal's snout. Moreover, the system of the present invention utilizes geographic region-specific anatomical values for scaling pictures across the species' ranges, such as the white-tailed deer range. The invention takes into account the fact that anatomical features and age of large mammals such as deer vary significantly among the ≧16 subspecies of white-tailed deer across the North American range (Baker 1984, Demarais, et al. 2000, Flinn 2010). The software of the present invention considers both spatial- and age-specific user input to correctly scale an image and transforms two-dimensional measurement estimates derived from two-dimensional (2D) photographs into three-dimensional (3D) measurement estimates of animal antlers, horns, and pronghorns internally using a set of statistically-derived equations. The invention is capable of using a single image or multiple images and provides extremely accurate analysis of antler, horn, and pronghorn size and a method for scoring these features and many other applications.
There is a growing need and demand by animal scientists, wildlife biologists and managers, and animal enthusiasts for a novel, efficient, and accurate system to estimate animal antler, horn, and pronghorn characteristics and the present invention provides such a system through software that calculates three-dimensional estimates of animal antlers, horns, and pronghorns and an animal scoring system using one, two, or three angle views of the animal.